Gothic Feminism

Gothic Feminism examines how pioneering British women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries responded to profound social and economic changes through their innovative literary expressions. In this incisive study, Diane Long Hoeveler explores the works of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters, revealing how these authors subtly crafted a new model of female identity. Building on themes from her previous work in Romantic Androgyny, Hoeveler probes the emergence of what she terms "victim feminism," a literary ideology that presented professionalized femininity as both a response to and a tool for negotiating the challenges of a burgeoning middle-class society. Through a neo-feminist lens, she demonstrates how the Gothic novel served as a narrative mechanism for redefining gender, portraying strategic passivity and controlled emotion as means of social survival while also offering a critique of oppressive social hierarchies.